Photographic Quiz:
Photo no. 109:- Why did this photo of the salver hang on the old Coventry Godiva Harriers club house wall for a long time??
Dear Blog,
So some of the Olympic G.B. team have been announced in the press. I hope that the athletes concerned had a more positive experience than I had when I was selected for my first major Games. Finishing my lunchtime session, having showered and dressed, I met a local journalist as I was leaving the Butts Stadium changing rooms in Coventry. The journalist specialised in writing reports on the rugby scene in the local paper at the time but he was also a member of Godiva Harriers and is now editor of the NUTS Newsletter, Bob Phillips. He asked me if I knew that I had been selected for the Games as the news had just come in on the wire at the newspaper office. I told him that I hadn’t and, although I was third G.B. finisher in the trial, I did not think that I would be picked, expecting the selectors to do their usual trick, and select the established stars. I spoke from experience. In my first season of athletics after I had joined a running club, I had finished in the first six of the County Cross Country Championships, but the six selected for the Youths Inter County Cross Country Championships did not include my name but instead the list included the name of a ‘local star’ who had finished behind me in the County Championship. To say I was p***** off is to put it mildly. I had earned my place, but the favoured athlete was selected instead. NOT FAIR. Not fair at all, Blog. So, I wrote to the county of my birth and asked if I could run in their trial. They selected me for the Inter Counties and I ran for the county of my birth for the rest of my trudging career. This despite being eligible for a couple of other counties in the meanwhile where I would certainly have been assured of a clutch of team medals!!! They were good enough to select me, so I always turned up for the County Championships as a moral obligation. It is a pity that that kind of sentiment is a little lacking in certain athletic departments nowadays. And it took the British Athletic Authorities another fortnight to let me know that I had been chosen to run for Great Britain in the Games …. They had lost my address, and I couldn’t be contact on the telephone because I didn’t have a telephone. An interesting spin off is that the ECCU [English Cross Country Union] always contacted me via a telegram to my place of work every time I was selected to run cross country on the continent. Of course, most of the selections had to be turned down because the local authority stopped my pay and the brown envelopes were not enough to compensate!!
Ref my last note to you Blog …. Funding …. Guess what Blog. The long-time sponsors of athletics seem to be losing interest in the sport post-Olympic Games. Now there is a surprise? For some time now, the poor athletes have been exposed to the advertising whims of the sports sponsors at a fraction of their commercial worth. The athletes were signed up for funding and sold their commercial birth right as a consequence. It brings to mind the quip in the age of amateurism of the 50s, 60s and 70s when the amateur athlete said that they could not afford the financial loss incurred in becoming a professional athlete!!! The old brown envelope??
Colin
Fact: NUTS is the acronym for the National Union of Track Statisticians. The Newsletters are well worth a read.
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